In this provocative article, the authors passionately “right the ship of state,” which in their opinion as sailed adrift. On the heels of Friedman’s popular work, The World is Flat, these attempt to apply the lessons therein to the field of education.In its quest for standardization and testing, under No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the education establishment has focused on reading scores, math tests and closing the "achievement gap" between social classes. Instead, this article contends that an entire generation will fail in the global economy because they can't think their way through abstract problems, work in teams, distinguish good information from bad, or speak a language other than English.